I cut across the village main road into an estate with wide green patches around houses. Over a stile, a footpath goes up a farm track. Here are the remains of a large tree that came down in one this winter’s storms, although the tree looks more like it exploded from inside its trunk.
There are horses in fields to both sides, and a bundle of goats in the lane that have wriggled through a gate into a smallholding.
It’s all uphill to the end of the lane. Here’s the village to the north of ours. It looks more like the traditional idea of a pit village – rows of red-brick terraces with utilitarian names. A red kite drifts above the terraces and the Premier shop.
North of that village there’s another track with hedges of hawthorn and blackthorn and increasingly protruding brambles and nettles. What I think is a blackcap flies in and out of the hedge at one point and I see a wren and a robin too. On the lower side is a couple of rough fields – clumps of gorse and tufts of tough marshy grass around softer meadow grass. There’s a deer grazing on the far side. It’s high (and clear) enough up here to see all the way to Newcastle and some of the Northumbrian hills.
I double back on an almost parallel path, moving to a slightly higher level. There’s a sequence of meadows with a mixture of proper footpaths and desire/permissive paths used by the local dog walkers. Here I see two hummingbird hawk-moths with bright red/orange wings, close enough to see the proboscis of one. I’ve never seen these in the north east before but saw them fairly often when I lived in Devon.
Heading home, I take the back lane between this high village and ours in the valley, then the looping path around another couple of meadows that runs to the west of the lane. These fields had sheep in during the winter but they were moved out in March and now it’s high purple-tinged grass. A pair of curlews seem to be nesting in this field and today they fly low wide circles around me as I walk the far edge of the field. They make mostly short peeping sounds and sometimes land briefly on different spots in this and the next field (presumably – though this is me guessing inside a curlew brain that might well be nothing like mine – to divert attention from where the nest is). Their beaks are extraordinary – they look as thin as wire and then they open and somehow there’s two even thinner parts that look somehow more powerful separated and in motion.
I go home along a footpath that involves stepping over a very small stream, with more common curlew sounds – the long rippling songs – audible for much of the way. In the hedge is the last visible pink residue of hawthorn blossom which looks as if its retreating back into the branches.
